Questions for the amateur grower

[sargentscraps]

Second time poster long time browser. Love the site, so much great info and good to see so many people sharing the same passion.

My questions are as follows:

 

1) When doing an outdoor grow but start your girls in indoor just to give them a kick start, how do you keep them in veg without going to flower when you put them underr the sun? Please dont suggest that i research as i have browsed pages of these forums and have found no real answer, most people just say yeah it went to flower but went back to re-veg. Is that bad or can they handle going back to veg?

 

2) If you were in a climate where there was roughly 60mm of rain a month and you had a good soil mix and water crystals, in other words one that was good at holding moisture and releasing it slowly over time. How much water as an 'Estimate' would you need to feed your plants providing they had decent sun during the day? How much could you get away with?

 

Any advice is Welcome.

Thanks in advance

Scraps

[Luke Skywalker]

Hi there, keep posting and asking, no such thing as a stupid question if you don't know the answer.

 

Q1) Usually it depends on the local light hours, but you can offset this a bit by germinating and growing under a relative light cycle. See what the daylight hours are when you're planning to be moving them outdoors and set your cycle to this with a small increase. This allows for less differential between the plants light hours when moving from indoors to out.

 

Even if they do start to flower when you plant them out in spring, pretty quickly they'll realise what's happening with the increasing daylight hours and start to vegetate. Certainly it's not ideal for them to start flowering and then veg again, but they're relatively tough plants and with a bit of loving and care they'll pull through fine. Just watch out for flowers maturing on the lower branches later on during veg, as the stem increases in thickness these individual flowers will die off and can be a source of infection. Pretty easily removed when the plant is in full vegetative growth a few weeks later with a brush of the thumb or some scissors/scalpel blade. Don't do this until the stem is significantly thicker though, and don't remove the flowering tops if they develop on the little plant as it is from these flowering sites that the new vegetative growth will sprout from. A good seaweed feed can help with the transition a bit, and a good high N growing nutrient (but not to excess of course) will give them a kick up the bum vegetatively. You can always suppliment their lighting outdoors as well, an outdoor houselight if run for long enough near the plants will help to convince the plants that it's time to grow.

 

q2) The watering schedule is so varied it's not funny. 60mm rain could be cold and wet or hot and humid. It could come all at once or in drizzle over time. The soil could be very retentive of moisture or it could repel or drain it away very quickly. The short answer? Water them as needed. I know that sounds rather simple and it's a bit hard to see that as a definitive answer, but it's the way it is unfortunately. I'm sure someone will give you some recommendations as to watering levels and times outdoors, but try not to overdo it, particularly when young. The water crystals will hold a lot of moisture in the soil and can keep things a bit wet sometimes.

 

Good luck.

[sargentscraps]

Wow cheers for the fast and detailed reply. When adjusting the light cycles you said make them the same except increase indoor light a little more. by how much did you mean? 20 minutes or 2 hours?

And the reason I ask with watering is because I would only be able to tend to these plants weekly at a maximum, most likely fortnightly or even longer as they will be a distance away. So I was thinking along the lines of a reservoir, natural rain and good soil would be my best bet. I'm trying to figure out how big and much I will need etc..

Cheers

Scraps

[The Hash Nibbler]

Hey sargentscraps, I should of known when I saw Professor skywalkers name on the posts, that he would leave me with nothing to add except have a great grow and "Wot He Said =)" GH72 Onya Young Jedi.

[Luke Skywalker]

When adjusting the light cycles you said make them the same except increase indoor light a little more. by how much did you mean? 20 minutes or 2 hours?

 

An hour or so should do, you want to be above the "trigger point" for dark hours but not so far above that when it goes outside it thinks that things are dark for too long. You can also maintain vegetative growth with an interrupted night cycle, just using a small light for a short period to break the flowering development. 20 mins in the middle of the night can do wonders to keep things growing.

 

And the reason I ask with watering is because I would only be able to tend to these plants weekly at a maximum, most likely fortnightly or even longer as they will be a distance away. So I was thinking along the lines of a reservoir, natural rain and good soil would be my best bet. I'm trying to figure out how big and much I will need etc..

 

If you mix in good quality compost into rich soil with water crystals it should do well, but the weather is the king here. If it's hot and dry where it's going to be planted you'll dry out quicker and need to visit more often. The more organic matter you can get into the hole the better to retain moisture and encourage healthy growth. You can set up a small camoflaged tank if you have moisture problems and feed via driplines and gravity. There are some wick based water bladders which wrap around the bases of plants which can help with long periods of dryness. So yeah, you're thinking along the right track, just remember that these bastards can be huge with some full sun and the root system is impressive when given good soil and watering. The bigger the prepared area and the better you do the job of enriching the soil the better you will do.

 

You may need to find some growers in your local area or at least city to get more helpful outdoor growing information, as the accumulated knowledge of local conditions can be invaluable.

 

Hope that helps mate, been entirely too long since I have had a plant outdoors. Maybe next year...

[sargentscraps]

Thanks mate couldnt have asked for some better replies.

Cheers

Scraps